There's entirely too much good stuff on YouTube to ignore. I learn so much there, all for free.

I don't really see YouTube as an alternative to books. Where video shines is in shorter instructional practical stuff. Sure, if I want to understand the underlying mechanism of something then I'll read-up on it but usually I don't need that kind of knowledge. I just want to watch someone do the task I'm about to do.

For anything IT related I usually dislike video guides as they're so slow to get to the point. But that's because I work in IT and don't need to be told that messing around with a disk partition could cause problems with my computer. With non-IT tasks I'm happy to be treated as a moron because I don't have anywhere near as much experience.

When you say "Use an awful lot less data" - is that still an issue most of the time? That's depressing.

> When you say "Use an awful lot less data" - is that still an issue most of the time? That's depressing.

I don't see a particular point in pulling down a few hundred megabytes that contains radically less actual useful content than a megabyte or two of compressed text and images. HN is particularly nice on that front, as the pages are tiny and gzip down to a rounding error (this reply page is a whopping 15kb of transfer). They don't load half a Windows 95 worth of tracking Javascript either.

Up until fairly recently, I had two rural WISP connections that mostly didn't meet rated speeds during the day, were borderline unusable during the evening (that Netflix can stream video tolerably on a lossy 1-2Mbit connection is quite impressive, the few times we tried it), and despite that have been working remotely full time on those connections.

I'd signed up for the Starlink beta some months back, and we have that as our secondary connection now (it's still exceedingly erratic - I'll go from 5Mbit to 150Mbit and back over the course of a minute and then it'll break my connections as there's no satellite overhead - but this is the point of a beta, and it's better than the 5/1 that mostly delivered about 3/0.5). I like it, but the power consumption on the dish is quite obscene. It idles a hair under 100W, and consumes 2.2kWh/day, per my measurements. I hope that improves over time.

It's not that I can't transfer a lot of data, it's just that I prefer not to when I can avoid it. And, there are, often enough, times when it simply won't work. Not a big deal, we live out here willingly, but, yes, it's still a thing. I keep a cheap cell plan too, because I just don't need to be streaming content on my phone.

> I don't see a particular point in pulling down a few hundred megabytes that contains radically less actual useful content than a megabyte or two of compressed text and images.

For everything from waspkeeping to bookbinding, there's nothing else that can come close to the same semantic bandwidth as video does.

I've spent far more than half an hour reading blog posts on bookbinding, and still had to work out almost all the details for myself in terms of how to actually do it - not that I haven't found useful information in those posts! One linked here not long ago clued me in to a couple of tools I'd never yet heard of, and that in particular has been incredibly useful - because of it, I'm a lot closer to producing perfect-bound books indistinguishable in quality from those made professionally. But half an hour spent watching Adventures in Bookbinding - actively watching, skimming and reviewing where necessary, not just passively staring - has served me better in terms of the sheer mechanical doing of making books than all the blogs I've read put together. IT is one thing - I'm a software engineer, I get what you're saying - but when it comes to work you do with your hands, there really is no substitute for the chance to watch over the shoulder of someone who's mastered the skill.

(I don't actually keep wasps, although I've given it serious thought - the problem is that you really need to habituate them to your presence starting with the foundress's emergence from diapause, and I don't have any way to know where polistid foundresses spend their winters. But I'd never even imagined doing it before I found videos made by people who do it, and have done it for years. There's something of worth in that, too.)

I feel like I often have time saved on almost exactly the situation you described. Changing the alternator on our Honda CR-V, there's a method to remove the fan and fan support and pull the alternator out the front of the car and top instead of doing a lot more disassembly on the front of the engine (side of the car) and draining the coolant. I wouldn't have thought to do it that way if I hadn't been in the habit of watching 2 or 3 videos of new-to-me car repairs.

I find myself watching zero mass-market television and a lot more YouTube (tech, electronics, machining, mostly) and think it a lot better value for entertainment time spent than TV ever was. (Sure, it's not as dense as reading a technical book, but after a day of work, I'm more up for the casual experience.)

I can't stand video as casual content generally (e.g. news stories), but in terms of how-to information, a video is truly worth a million words at least. Compare watching five videos on doing a somewhat complex maintenance job on your truck compared to reading the Chiltons manual, and you get an idea.

> I'm perfectly happy to be called a curmudgeon or such with regards to my preferences for text and images over video, and there may be part of it that's true - but I've weighed video versus the alternatives, and outside entertainment (which there's certainly some value in), I find video coming up wanting.

I agree with your preference for books, but I am going to add a caveat: the quality of books varies considerably, with a good video being better than a mediocre book.

That was not much of a problem when I lived in a big city. It was easy to walk into a bookstore or library to pick out something of value. Living in a small city limits the options. Buying online means buying sight unseen. In the worse case, ratings can be misleading. In the best case, recommendations are likely coming from someone with different needs. YouTube avoids the problem since there is no financial risk involved in making a choice, and decent quality content isn't too hard to find.

(To give you an idea of what I mean: I live in a city of half a million people. The public library system's most advanced text on electronics is an old edition of the ARRL Handbook. The rest are projects books directed towards amateurs. Book sellers aren't much better since few want to stock technical titles. University libraries offer much better books, yet they are nearly impossible to borrow during the academic session.)

I consider YouTube a tool. It gives me, as you pointed out, surface level knowledge. Once I'm armed with that, I can go dig deeper and find the books or resources I need to gain expert-level knowledge.

>>I've also found that YouTube leads to a very poor, surface understanding of most issues - and this isn't the fault of YouTube specifically, it's just a limit of video.

Try watching TIK's BattleStorm Stalingrad series (link below). Exceptionally well-researched and the videos are information-dense. I own one of the books cited in his series, the 700-page "Armageddon in Stalingrad" by David Glantz. His video format communicates a fairly high understanding of the play of events, of the people involved, and other nuances, in less time than pouring over ALL of the source material would take. He mixes tactical/operational maps with dialogue bubbles of key commanders, tables of equipment readiness/casualties, quotes from people who fought there or from books, and lately he's been adding photos showing where on the battlefield they were taken. So a lot of it is book content (and many of the authors comment on his videos, praising his work), but he steps through the battle in almost real-time, and it provides a better view of scope, scale, and even decision-making by key leaders than digesting static maps in a book would. I would challenge the assertion that reading all of the books oneself would yield a significantly higher comprehension of the battle, and it certainly wouldn't be time-efficient to do so. Hence video as a communication medium is not inherently flawed. Like any other medium it is reliant upon exceptionally well-produced content. Most YT content isn't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAfo5mse-ag&list=PLNSNgGzale...

I could not repair half the things I have learned to repair without Youtube. 100% worth having to look out for manipulative antifeatures, in my book.

I'm happy for the content in any form, but a bunch of things would be easier with a wall of text and a couple pictures I could scroll through.

Don't forget to like and subscribe and support me on patreon.

My 5 year old often tells me to like and subscribe to his channel.

He doesn't have one.

This is certainly true when I want to sit down and repair something. There are other times when I just want to see what's involved and how complicated something will be first, maybe have dinner at the same time. This sort of higher level overview is where I find youtube fits in well, same for programming related videos.

I wish there were more hybrid approaches, video with the accompanying wall of text.

What sort of stuff, and what alternatives have you tried?

If it's a vehicle, the Chilton's or Haynes (I'm sure there's a difference but I sure couldn't tell) manuals will cover just about anything you'd want to do.

If it's a piece of consumer electronics, iFixit usually has good teardown and repair guides (in the "annotated images and text" style) that cover a lot, though for some brands you can actually find factory repair manuals.

Home, property, etc, there exist plenty of books out there, and often enough, plenty of slightly bored retired people who have been doing whatever the task is forever, and who are happy to help someone learn the ropes.

snort a few videos blow Chilton's out of the water any day. Chilton's is often filled with inaccurate photos (approximating the model year you're interested in), have wonky angles that take some deciphering to figure out, my Chiltons were all B&W photos (maybe that's changed?) or line drawings, and the instructions can be pretty vague. A video is often literally looking over a mechanic's shoulder as he does the procedure and offers tips along the way. Cross reference these instructions with a few other videos, some forum posts, and you'll be in a much better spot than with Chiltons.

Source: decades of working on my vehicles with Chiltons manuals.

So I buy the Haynes book for my car, wait for it to be shipped and delivered, then finally figure out how to do what I need to do. Then I put it away for 1-5 years until I need it again, and hope I don't forget where I put it.

Or you want me to build a friendship with a retired fridge repairman? I don't understand that one.

With youtube I get to watch a pro do it right in front of me for free instantly. There's nothing like it.

ifixit is good, though, I'll agree to that.

You buy them at the local auto parts store and put them either in the car somewhere or on the bookshelf of other auto repair books, of course. I didn't think twice about spending 20% of the purchase cost of a vehicle on the rebuild manual for it back when I drove stuff that needed a lot more work. I drove some cheap cars.

As far as stuff like fridges... you don't need a fridge repairman, just someone who has worked on a variety of things. For a while, while I was doing laptop repair work, I didn't really need manuals for the bulk of the stuff I was taking apart because it was just a laptop. They all came apart in a handful of ways, and as long as you keep close track of where the screws came from and got them back where they went, it wasn't a big deal to get some random laptop apart.

If you can find a YouTube repair of your particular product, and the video is well done, OK, I can see value in that. My experience has been that it's usually a lot of mumbling, terrible light, and weird camera angles that I can't map to anything actually on the product I'm trying to repair, so it's generally not a good use of time vs just going and working on it. Shoving your cell phone kinda sorta in the engine bay, pointing it at some shadows, and "mmfffs the bolt... ffssssh" because it's windy out... eh? Or just a 45 minute "teardown" of a simple product that hasn't had any of the random futzing around and reading the manual out loud edited out.

Maybe we just fix different things.

I replaced a 12V battery on my car this morning, thanks to a youtube vid. I didn't try any alternative sources, because the 2 minute video was perfect! And I didn't get sucked into any other vids or see any ads or anything.

My recent experience with iFixit was not great. I replaced a battery on a 2012 MacBook Pro Retina, and the tutorial included about 40 extraneous steps (that only mattered if you were using a certain, optional, glue removal goo -edit: and it was not referred to as optional, nor were alternatives offered. I used fishing line). I saw speculation that they intentionally made it seem more difficult so people would be more inclined to bring the laptop into a shop. It wasn't until I checked youtube, and saw a very similar procedure, that I realized the steps were unnecessary - via the comments! A few people noted that you could skip all the steps prior to 11 minutes in. And they were right.

>the Chilton's or Haynes (I'm sure there's a difference but I sure couldn't tell) manuals will cover just about anything you'd want to do.

Chilton and Haynes both generally consist of vague instructions like "unscrew bolts and remove part x". They're good for identifying which components need to be removed for access, but they often offer very little in terms of where bolts are (sometimes there are pictures), or how to deal with problem areas (e.g. sometimes you need to wiggle or turn things a certain way).

Their limited instructions don't compare to watching someone actually do it and walk you through problem points simultaneously.

I don't know why you're being downvoted, because you are obviously right — just like the audience will go where the content is, the content creators will go where they can get an audience.

Probably downvoted because of that last sentence.

But that's actually a good insight: it isn't Google that has taught me anything, but people, who happened to use Google's properties to distribute knowledge. Any other service would be as good, if the people chose to use it.

Agreed but youtube has some valuable content, e.g. if you're into chess, there are some irreplaceably good videos out there. The way I use them is via youtube-dl.

Newpipe -> disable comments, disable recommendations. I only see what I search for and I don't have to see the opinions of morons in the comments.

I stopped using youtube regularly a while back. It's still good for how-to videos, and niche searches. Useless for current events.